Urbanism has many facets, but walkability is integral to most of them. A goal of much of my blogging is encouraging more new walkable urban development. I also write about enhancing walkability in places where it exists, but is flawed.

Earlier this year, I wrote several times about Jeff Speck, including a review of his “Walkable City”. The book was also a reading selection for Petaluma Urban Chat. We spent several meetings chewing over the lessons imparted by what many consider the urban planning book of 2013.

A walkability rule-of-thumb is that motivated pedestrians will walk to destinations that are ten minutes away before resorting to cars. So time is a fine initial measure of walkability. But it isn’t sufficient. Others factors also affect walkability.

In “Walkable City”, author Jeff Speck writes about the failures of past urban beautification programs. He recalls “the famous ’Five Bs’ of the eighties – bricks, banners, bandstands, bollards, and berms – that now grace many an abandoned downtown.”

I smiled at the description, picturing a generic deserted downtown with […]

East Washington Street in Petaluma, particularly between the freeway and Petaluma Boulevard, is a miserable place to walk. Four lanes of car traffic, skinny sidewalks directly behind the curbs, and no parking to act as a buffer. I don’t like walking there and cringe when I see others ambulating.

During successive summers in the early 1960s, my parents arranged the weekly rental of an apartment in San Clemente, north of San Diego. (This would have been a decade before Richard Nixon made San Clemente famous for the “Western White House”.)

A Poynton intersection. From the video Poynton Regenerated on Amalgamated.

I’ve previous written about the complete streets concept, which aims to give pedestrians and bicyclists facilities equal to those given to drivers. I’ve also written about woonerfs, low speed residential streets in which the distinction between sidewalks and roadways is removed, forcing cars to […]

“Walkable City” by Jeff Speck doesn’t break much new ground. But it doesn’t need to. Instead, Speck takes a wealth of accumulated wisdom about walkability, polishes it to a warm patina, assembles it in a cohesive format, and presents it back to the reader. An anecdote will help illustrate.